My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

Summary

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

After inheriting 400 novels of pornography written by his father in the 1970s and ‘80s, critically acclaimed author Chris Offutt sets out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship in this carefully observed, beautifully written memoir.

“Chris Offutt owns one of the finest, surest prose styles around, ready and able to convey the hardest truth without flinching. Now Offutt enters the darkest and most mysterious of places—the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt—armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth—and his masterpiece.” —Michael Chabon

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the “king of twentieth-century smut,” with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.

With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion he wrote more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.

Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father’s manuscripts and memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he’d loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.

In My Father, the Pornographer, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. This is a book about the life of a working writer who supports his family solely by the output of his typewriter; it’s about the awful psychic burdens one generation unthinkingly passes along to the next; and it’s about growing up in the Appalachian hills with a pack of fearless boys riding bicycles through the woods, happy and free.

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My Father, the Pornographer - Chris Offutt

1986

Chapter One

MY FATHER grew up in a log cabin near Taylorsville, Kentucky. The house had twelve-inch walls with gun ports to defend against attackers, first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At age twelve, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method—find it and land on it—using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. He eventually wrote and published more than four hundred books under eighteen different names. His novels included six science fiction, twenty-four fantasy, and one thriller. The rest was pornography.

When I was nine, Dad gave me his childhood copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The old hardback was tattered, the boards held by fraying strips of fabric, the pages pliant and soft. It is a coming-of-age narrative about thirteen-year-old Jim Hawkins, who discovers a secret map, leaves England, and returns with a large share of pirate treasure. I loved the fast-paced story and the bravery of young Jim.

On paper cut from a brown grocery sack, I carefully drew an island with a coastline, water, and palm trees. A dotted line led to a large red X. My mother suggested I show the map to my father. Dad wiped coffee on the paper and wadded it up several times, which made it seem older. He used matches to ignite the edges of the map, then quickly extinguished the flame. This produced a charred and ragged border that enhanced the map’s appearance, as if it had barely survived destruction. Because of the fire involved, we were alone outside, away from my younger siblings. Dad was selling insurance at the time, rarely home, his attention always focused elsewhere. I enjoyed the sense of closeness, a shared project.

Dad said that he drew maps for most of the books he wrote, and I resolved that if I ever published a book, I’d include a map. Twenty years later I did. In 1990 I called my father with the news that Vintage Contemporaries was publishing Kentucky Straight, my first book. A long silence ensued as Dad digested the information.

I’m sorry, he said.

What do you mean? I said.

I didn’t know I’d given you a childhood terrible enough to make you a writer.

His own father wrote short stories in the 1920s. During the Depression, my grandfather was forced to abandon his literary ambitions to save the family farm and pursue a more practical education in engineering. He died young, a year before my father published his first story. Dad never knew what it was like to have a proud father and didn’t know how to be one himself.

After the publication of Kentucky Straight, people began asking Dad what he thought of my success. Buried in the question was the implication that the son had outdone the father. My work was regarded as serious literature, whereas he wrote porn and science fiction. Twice I witnessed someone insinuate that Dad should be envious. Invariably my father had the same response. His favorite adventure novel was The Three Musketeers, in which young D’Artagnan wins respect through his magnificent swordplay, taught to him by his father. Every time someone asked Dad about my success as a writer, he said he was happy to be D’Artagnan’s sword master, voicing pride in my accomplishments but taking credit for them, as well. It was as close as he ever came to telling me how he felt about my work.

Chapter Two

MY FATHER was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast, fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic. Early in his sales career, a boss called him an independent son of a bitch, which Dad took as the highest compliment he’d ever received. He wanted me to be the same way.

Dad had no hobbies, no distractive activities. He didn’t do household chores, wash the car, mow the grass, go shopping, or fix anything. He never changed a lightbulb. I never saw him hold a screwdriver, stand on a ladder, or consult a repair manual. His idea of cleaning was to spit on a tissue and wipe the object. He didn’t sleep much. He drank. He rarely left the house. Dad was an old-school pulp writer, a machine who never stopped. In his home office hung a handmade sign that said: Writing Factory: Beware of Flying Participles.

The winter of 1968 was known in the hills as the year of the big snows, which closed my grade school for two weeks and trapped the family on our home hill in eastern Kentucky. For the first time in my father’s life, he could do what he always wanted—write fourteen hours a day. He ran out of cigarettes and Mom sent me to the general store a couple of miles away. I followed a path through the woods, each leafless tree limb lined with a layer of white. Frozen deer saliva glistened at the ends of chewed branches.

I made good time by walking the iced-over creek, sliding my feet along the bright surface. Smoke from the store’s wood stove rose to the top of the ridge, then flattened and began to dissipate in a long, low ribbon. Inside I sat by the fire until my wet pants legs were steaming and my feet had warmed. The proprietor, a kind man named George, gave me a piece of chocolate. He’d been in operation since the forties, the only business to survive the closing of the mines. He sold me cigarettes and I went home.

The following week I walked to the bootlegger for Dad. I left our dirt road for a game path through the woods, staying high enough on the hill to evade dogs. After a mile I dropped down the hill and crossed the blacktop to the bootlegger’s small shack. It was a one-room building with a sliding plywood panel serving as a window. No one ever robbed it, a testament to local respect and fear. I stood on layers of snow packed hard from tire tracks and the tread of many boots. The man inside was red-faced, with wild hair.

Whose boy are you? he said in a gruff voice.

Andy Offutt’s first boy, I said. Chris.

Offutt, he said. Uh-huh. What’s he wanting?

Bourbon.

Bourbon, he said. Yep. Reckon you’re his boy, then.

I placed ten dollars on the rough wood shelf. He exchanged the money for two pints of whiskey. I reached for them, but he grabbed my wrist with a grip stronger than I’d ever felt, as if the bones were rasping inside my arm. It was a test of sorts, and I tried not to show pain.

Don’t you ever fuck with me, he said.

I shook my head obediently. He released me and I entered the woods. Concealed from view, I dropped to my knees and rubbed snow on my wrist until both hands were numb. I could feel tears frozen below my eyes and was embarrassed, even alone in the ivory silence.

One summer a few years later, my two best friends and I decided we’d try drinking. We met at night in the woods and walked to the bootlegger. A different man was there, legendary for the length of his tongue, a .357 Magnum he occasionally flashed, and a certain rough charm with women. I told him I was Andy Offutt’s first boy and he’d sent me for whiskey. My buddies each bought what their fathers drank, and we left with bourbon, a half case of beer, and a large bottle of cheap red wine. Undoubtedly the bootlegger knew we were lying, but the hills were lawless in the 1960s.

We resorted to walking the blacktop, which would take less time than traversing the woods. The road curved three hundred yards to the top of a hill, then a long slow drop to the creek. We lightened our load by drinking a beer. I hated the taste and switched to whiskey. We headed down the hill. By the time we reached the bottom, I’d finished one half-pint and opened another, then fell in the creek and took a rest. I woke up in a car and went back to sleep. Next I awakened sick to my stomach on the front porch of a nearby house. I made it home and went to bed. It was a disgraceful beginning to the pleasures of alcohol, a clear warning to stay away from whiskey. Instead, I visited the bootlegger dozens of times before leaving Kentucky. Drinking bourbon changed the terrible way I consistently felt about myself. I suppose it was the same for Dad, who eventually died of liver failure.

And the boys I got drunk with that first time forty years ago? One shot himself to death and the other will be released from prison at age seventy-five.

Chapter Three

BY 2012 Dad had been occupying a large chair for several years, eating, sleeping, drinking, and writing there. Three days before Christmas my mother called my house in Mississippi, a rarity in itself. She spoke rapidly, her voice fraught with anxiety, an element of despair coursing beneath her words. I’d never heard this tone from her. She informed me that my father had fallen. Too small to help him up, Mom had called an ambulance service. The EMTs took Dad to the hospital, where the doctors decided to keep him. Mom wasn’t sure why.

Would you please come home? she said.

The nature of our family is that no one appeals for help of any kind—not financial, emotional, or moral support. Since Mom was asking, I knew it was serious. Uncertain of the circumstances, I packed clothes appropriate to a funeral, drove all day, and arrived on the winter solstice, gray and rainy, a sense of melancholy draping the hills. I went straight to the hospital. Dad was too bloated for diagnosis. The first order of business was draining forty pounds of fluid, which wasn’t going well.

I accompanied Mom to the house in which I’d grown up, her home of fifty years. My mother loved Dad with a tenacious loyalty and devotion. She accepted his quirks and admired his brilliance. The strength of their marriage was due solely to her. She ran every errand, shopped, cooked, cleaned, and drove her children places. She typed every final manuscript Dad wrote.

Mom was five feet, two inches tall, with red hair, green eyes, and a good figure. She stayed out of the sun to avoid freckling. For a year after high school she attended Transylvania University, left for economic reasons, and began working in a bank. She’d always regretted not furthering her education, and in 1980 she enrolled at Morehead State University, where I was a senior. For the next twelve years she took a few classes per year as one of the first continuing education students at MSU, receiving a BA in philosophy and a master’s in English. She taught freshman composition for three years on campus, then began teaching at the newly opened state prison in West Liberty, Kentucky.

From ages sixty-five to seventy-eight, she worked full-time as a secretary in Morehead to supplement their combined Social Security income. Mom was adamant that they didn’t need the money, but I understood the truth—my parents’ sense of pride forbade her from admitting financial need. I also know that the job was crucial in that it provided my mother with escape five days a week. Her children had left home and moved far away, but Mom could get only as far as the nearest town for work. She had her own life there—walking to the bank every day, chatting with the mailman and a woman who worked at the liquor store.

The morning after I arrived home, Mom rose early and went to the hospital. I walked through the house and discovered that two weeks of heavy rain had flooded the basement, which was not draining. Dad had always called his neighbor Jimmy to deal with plumbing problems. Jimmy was dead, so I called his son, who showed up promptly. Sonny and I were glad to see each other but stood awkwardly in the drizzling rain, unsure what to do. Men in the hills didn’t touch except to punch each other or accidentally brush arms while engaged in a shared chore. We grinned and looked away, scratched ourselves, and grinned some more. I asked how he was, and he said, Straight as a stick, son.

The water in the basement was six inches deep, more than Sonny or I had ever seen there. I’d brought shoes suitable for the woods but not wading and remained on the basement steps with a flashlight. Sonny moved slowly through the water, seeking the drain, wearing large rubber boots. He said they’d belonged to his dad. At the top of the steps I found my father’s old zip galoshes. The rubber was ripped at the stress marks across the toe. I wrapped two plastic bags around my feet and slid them into Dad’s boots.

Sonny was crouching over the drain. He dipped his hand into the murky water, felt around briefly, and said: Phillips. I went upstairs and fetched a Phillips-head screwdriver. Sonny removed the drain cap and fed the metal snake into the pipe. I remembered being a child and watching Jimmy snake out the drain while Dad stood idly by, holding a flashlight. Now Sonny and I repeated their behavior, wearing our fathers’ boots.

The walls of the basement were moldy, the rafters covered in cobwebs. Dark water moved beneath our feet. The motor rattled as the steel wire coiled and uncoiled within the drum. I recalled playing in the basement with Sonny and his brothers. As the youngest boy on the hill, he trailed behind us and never spoke. I mentioned the past to Sonny, but he had no interest in nostalgia. He was occupying the moment, running the snake by feel, staring into the middle distance, frowning and muttering exactly as his father had. Sonny believed the snake was getting diverted into another pipe. He retracted it and tried again.

Still writing tales? he said.

I told him yes and he nodded once, returning his attention to the snake. Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer. I was merely doing what other men did—following in my father’s footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk was the town drunk in two towns. Sons of soldiers joined the army. That I had become a writer was perfectly normal.

The water level lapped against the walls from our movement. One of Dad’s boots began to leak. Sonny shut off the machine. He told me to go down the hill twenty-five feet to the old sewage trench, now replaced by a septic tank. As a kid I’d spent hundreds of hours over the hill, finding snakeskins and rabbit dens, old bottles and animal bones, feathers and lucky rocks. I knew the gap in the brush and the best route down. In the forty years since my last venture, bushes had spread and grown, and I was much less agile. My boot skidded and I went to one knee but remained upright. Rooted in earth rich with human waste, the forsythia tendrils were higher than my head, bigger than my thumb, tangled and knotted together. Rain fell in waves. I had no hat or gloves.

Facing a row of briars, I knew instinctively to rotate my body into them, letting the thorns scrape but not grab hold. Now I had to find the old sewage trench. The rain increased. I crawled beneath the heavy overhang, moving slowly, joints stiff, the weight of my body hurting my hands pressed to the ground. Sonny yelled from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see him, but I waved my arms and shook a bush. He wanted to know if I heard anything.

What am I supposed to hear? I said.

Anything, son. Listen at the ground. It’s not supposed to make no noise, so anything you hear is good.

He went back in the house. The rain slackened momentarily. I bent forward and cupped my ears toward the earth. I heard cars on the blacktop at the foot of the hill and the gentle sound of thousands of raindrops striking thousands of leaves. I heard my own ragged breathing.

After a few minutes, Sonny yelled for me to come back to the house. The bushes were too intertwined for me to stand upright, and I had to scuttle backward. Limbs scratched my skin. Water ran into my pants. I emerged into a small clearing and tugged my clothes in place, shivering from the cold and sweating from exertion. I took two steps, slipped, and fell. Mud spattered my glasses. My cell phone rang and I ignored it. I fell twice more, scraping my hands. A branch tore along my cheek. I was breathing hard. It occurred to me that if I had a heart attack, Sonny would drag me up the hill and drive me to the hospital. Maybe I’d share a room with Dad.

I regained the safety of the yard. Sonny had packed up his snake machine and said he’d come back later and look for another drain. I was wet and muddy, irritated at the world and myself. Only a damn fool plunges down a steep hill, out of shape at age fifty-four, and attempts to hear the sound of dirt. I listened to the voicemail on my phone. The doctor thought my father might need a transfusion and my blood type matched his. I told Sonny, who looked away, then spoke quietly: You need you a ride to the hospital?

I shrugged and he said to get in. The sun was going down. We talked of our varied marriages, old buddies, and grade school teachers. Sonny dropped me at the hospital, but the medical emergency turned out be premature. Dad’s condition had stabilized. The catheter had begun draining.

Late that evening, the water was gone from the basement. I called Sonny, who said he’d found a better clean-out drain against the wall closest to the hill. He suggested I write its location on the wall in case someone else came next time. Sonny’s idea was practical and smart, but it shocked me. The notion of writing on the wall, even a dim basement corner, was unthinkable. It violated Dad’s rules. You wrote on pieces of paper, organized them into a manuscript, and produced a book. You didn’t write on a wall any more than you would spit on the floor. But Dad was sick and I was Sonny’s assistant. I had my instructions.

In the corner, I found the correct drain that led to the septic tank. I removed the cap of a black marker, its sharp scent momentarily overpowering the mold. In my life I’ve written over ten million words, but never before on a wall. If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble. In large letters I wrote Clean-Out Drain with an arrow pointing down.